importing your icloud reading list into pinboard

Apr 17, 2016

Recently my icloud/safari reading list overflowed; i started hunting for an exit strategy.

Because apple likes to use their plist format for most things, actually getting at the reading list items is fiddly; they’re stored in the same binary Bookmarks.plist file as your regular in-browser bookmarks, but File -> Export Bookmarks only gives you the non-reading list ones.

Alex Chan posted about his method of extracting reading list urls using python. Importing into pinboard is well-supported, but you have to structure your urls in a way it can parse. My first few attempts at shoving the urls exported using the script were only half-successful, as pinboard expects bookmarks to have titles as well as urls, so i ended up with pages of UNTITLED links.

I held my nose, figured out how to get page titles out of the Bookmarks.plist file, randomly bashed my keyboard until python came out and voilà!

You’ll have to paste the resulting chunk of awful html into an exported Safari Bookmarks file; if you’re importing everything into pinboard then just add it at the end, before the final closing </HTML> tag. If you want just your reading list and not the other bookmarks, go ahead and replace everything between <H1>Bookmarks</H1> and </HTML>.

Epilogue

After all of that drama, it turns out that Chrome imports reading list articles natively, so you could just go safari => chrome => pinboard; but then i wouldn’t hit my blogging quota.